ignorance

Comment of the Day: “In Search Of A Tipping Point: Trump, The Microphone, And Thomas Dewey’s Ghost”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Trump mic

Ed Moser, a sound designer, technical director and all-around theater pro (he produced and designed sound for my recent staging of “Twelve Angry Men”…he’s also a friend), enlightens us with some insider observation relevant to Donald Trump’s recent denigration of a sound tech. It also reveals an unattractive side of an earlier GOP presidential candidate. Here is Ed’s Comment of the Day on the post, In Search Of A Tipping Point: Trump, The Microphone, And Thomas Dewey’s Ghost:

I have a friend who engineered the sound for a large church back when McCain was a candidate. He visited the church for a “town meeting”.

My friend locked all the unused gear away, and for the event distributed only freshly batteried hand held wireless mics for the event with screw on caps on the bottom. Such caps are specifically designed to prevent clumsy performers from accidentally touching the controls on the bottom of the mic– where one could turn the mic off, change the battery, or worst of all, change the frequency. Then color coded the mics with bright spike tape, so that while he was at the sound board he could instantly tell which mic/channel he was dealing with.

The plan was for McCain to give a speech, then take questions from the floor. Runners would carry one of three hand helds to the person with the query, so the question could be heard throughout the house. There was a fourth back up.

If all of this sounds pretty standard for people who know what they’re doing and have done many such events before: well, it is.

That evening, during the event, the question and answer session occurs. The first mic, it develops, is dead. A quick check reveals that ALL FOUR are dead. Irked at having to come the the edge of the stage and get close to an actual person to hear an actual question, or perhaps just trying to infuse humor at an awkward moment, McCain points to the back of the house, right at my friend, and says to the crowd, “Fire that guy!”

He gets a laugh. Except from my friend, of course.

Continue reading →

Signature Significance: Bernie Sanders’ Ignorant Tweet

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Bernie tweet

Yesterday, the Democratic candidate for President of the United States, a long-time member of the United States Senate, tweeted this message to his “followers,” and also, given the nature of Twitter, the nation:

“You have families out there paying 6, 8, 10 percent on student debt but you can refinance your homes at 3 percent. What sense is that?”

Now, if you don’t instantly recognize why this is an astoundingly ignorant statement, especially for a Presidential candidate running on a platform of economic restructuring, that’s okay. Don’t feel badly. It’s a weekend, you’re probably groggy from all the holiday cheer, and most important of all, you aren’t presuming to hold yourself out as qualified to be President, or constantly lecturing about the evils of capitalism. Sanders is, however, and this cretinous statement is signature significance. Nobody who understands loans, interest, collateral, banking, or economics would say, write or publish such a fatuous statement, even once. This is signature significance: an informed, logical, attentive, competent individual will not make such a bone-headed mistake…never. Sanders, however, has said this at least twice; in October, he tweeted a variation on the same economically ignorant theme:

“It makes no sense that students and their parents pay higher interest rates for college than they pay for car loans or housing mortgages.”

Actually, it does, Senator; it makes perfect sense, unless you are twelve. The concept is called “collateral.” That is something of value that  a lender can take if a borrower defaults on the loan. The deal is interest, plus security, the collateral. A house or a car are tangible collateral, so the interest rate can be lower. When the loan is for college tuition, however, there is no collateral. If the borrower defaults on the loan, the bank can’t take the student’s diploma, or education, or download all of the alleged knowledge the loan paid for from brain to laptop. Of course the interest rate is higher. That is, “of course” if you know anything at all about finance.

The unavoidable and shocking conclusion: Sanders is holding himself out as the leader to revolutionize how the U.S. economy works, stimulate growth and jobs, and show the way to a fairer and more just financial system, yet he is stunningly uninformed about the basics of finance, hasn’t learned a thing in all his years in the Senate, and worse, lacks the diligence to learn what he has an obligation to understand in order to justify having a vote on economic matters in the U.S. Senate, never mind setting policy as President.

This is bad.

Is there any excuse or defense for that tweet? No. Should anyone trust an elected official this ignorant and so lazy and arrogant that he makes no effort to disabuse himself of financial illiteracy? No. Does such a bone-brained misunderstanding mean that no intelligent person should listen to or take seriously any of his pronouncements about the economy? Yes.

To be fair to the Senator, let’s try to find some explanation for this that doesn’t prove that he couldn’t pass Economics 101 at a community college: Continue reading →

Trick Polls: Obnoxious, Unfair, and Wrong

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Agrabah

Public Policy Polling, a Democratic outfit that specializes in asking Republicans questions specifically designed to allow the mainstream media to mock their ignorance, and smug progressives to puff their little pigeon chests up with pride, really hit the public relations jackpot with a recent survey indicating that 30% of Republican primary voters would support bombing Agrabah, which is where Aladdin hangs out in the Disney movie. In other words, it’s not a real place. (I know: all my Republican acquaintances are exclaiming, “Wait, you mean Aladdin isn’t real?) This gave a real chuckle to the left-wing websites and blogs, the  mainstream media and all those brilliant news anchors who don’t know what to say unless a teleprompter lays it out for them, and who believe people who look to them for enlightenment are smart.

Not taking this lying down, a conservative polling groups called WPA Research devised another deceptive poll that revealed that 44% of Democrats would support taking refugees from Agrabah.  So there.

Now conservatives can puff up their pigeon chests, I guess.

Message to pollsters: I know we’re talking about stupid and ignorant people here, but even they will eventually figure out that a certain percentage of poll questions aren’t honest, but are tricks designed to prove they are dumb, violent, stupid, greedy, bigoted, mean, or likely Trump supporters. The joke is on WPA and PPP: people trusted them, as they have traditionally trusted pollsters to be seeking useful opinion data, not proof of knee-jerk partisan idiocy. If a pollster asked about an individual, issue or nation,  those polled never dreamed that the question was setting them up to be scorned. Now both of these organizations have proclaimed that they can’t be trusted, that they aren’t neutral truth-seekers but adversaries with an agenda.

Good to know. Continue reading →

Unethical Meme Of The Week: Democratic Underground

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Meme

I know I could batter internet memes all day, but this one, by the Democratic Underground, particularly annoys me, as has the “chicken hawk” canard that knee-jerk anti-war activists have been wielding for decades.

To begin with, it’s an ad hominem argument, and thus unethical on its face. The question is whether a military option is the best and most responsible solution to an international problem, not who is asserting that it is. It is also an incompetent argument, as in stupid. There  is nothing about typical military experience that conveys expertise in foreign affairs or international politics. Military service, as in training, marching, being deployed and shooting a gun, and military action, as a strategic tool of diplomacy and international politics, are two different things. Lincoln was a superb Commander in Chief, but he didn’t gain that ability from his brief combat experience fighting Black Hawk Indians.

In fact, what is  the statement above supposed to imply? No Commander in Chief has had to risk personal combat if he chose war. Because there has been no draft since the the Nineties, the only way a political leader would ever have military experience would be if he chose a military career, which would mean that the meme suggests that a military career is a prerequisite for national leadership. But Democrats don’t believe that; nobody believes that. In fact, Democrats are wary and suspicious of the military, which they believe, with some justification,  is biased toward military involvement. They don’t even especially respect military service: look at how James Webb was treated in his brief presidential run. Continue reading →

Race-Baiting Scalia (For Doing His Job)

/ Jack Marshall / 68 Comments
Ignore them, Nino.

Ignore them, Nino.

As is often the case with topics here, I heard about the uproar over Justice Antonin Scalia’s controversial question during oral argument on the latest challenge to affirmative action accidentally, when a Facebook friend re-posted a furious message from his friend calling Scalia a moron and a racist. Even reading a second hand account of what somebody read that Scalia said (the transcript hadn’t been released, but never mind: that was enough for my friend’s African-American friend to call a Supreme Court Justice a racist and for my friend, who is a liberal-minded professor, to endorse it), I could tell that the attack was unfair and worse, outright race-baiting.

What Scalia was alleged to have asked a lawyer was whether affirmative action actually hurt blacks by putting them in “more advanced” institutions, that they “don’t belong” in elite schools. I knew, no matter what Justice Scalia really said, that he was talking about some blacks, not all blacks. That’s obvious: if an African American student can be admitted to an elite school without the “thumb on the scale” of affirmative action, obviously he or she is qualified and belongs there. But more importantly, I knew from personal experience that being admitted to a top school when the student’s credentials wouldn’t normally warrant it could be disastrous.

I worked in the administration of Georgetown Law Center in the late seventies and early eighties, as the school was trying to increase its percentage of black students. I was involved in the process sometimes, and was stunned by its unfortunate revelations: for example, some of the black students we accepted from elite colleges lacked basic reading, writing and critical thinking skills. I remember one Yale grad in particular who could not write a comprehensible sentence.

Georgetown Law set up a special class for these minority students (and a couple of  white “legacy” admits who were sons of wealthy alums, one of which I had specifically told his father could not possibly graduate, based on his college grades and test scores.) Then the school was sued by one of the affirmative action students, who claimed that making him take the remedial class was demeaning and racist. Of course he would have been better off in a less demanding law school. Affirmative action did none of these students any favors. In my opinion then and now, their welfare, confidence and self-esteem was  sacrificed so Georgetown could look progressive, and to the dubious objective of diversity for diversity’s sake.

It wasn’t just my Facebook friend’s friend that was bashing Scalia as a racist. It was much of the news media. “Justice Scalia Suggests Blacks Belong at ‘Slower’ Colleges” reported Mother Jones. “Scalia: Maybe black students belong at ‘less-advanced’ schools” reported The Hill. MSNBC’s slur was Justice Antonin Scalia floats ‘lesser schools’ for black students.  A New York Times editorial—the paper has, it appears, lost its mind– said that Scalia raised an “offensive premise which has not gotten such a full airing at the Supreme Court since the 1950s.” The New York’s Daily News  headlined“SUPREME DOPE” over a photo of Nino. Continue reading →

KABOOM! From The Niggardly Files: It Has Come To This!

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments
No, this graphic makes no sense, but neither does anything in the post...

No, this graphic makes no sense here, but neither does anything in the post…

A whole set of ethical guidelines were built upon the infamous episode in the District of Columbia government when a white executive was disciplined for using the word “niggardly,” because some of the products of the District of Columbia public schools were unfamiliar with the word and took offense. Then there was the time the Los Angeles NAACP attacked Hallmark for a “talking card” with an outer space theme that mentioned “black holes,” thinking the card was talking about “black ‘ho’s.”

These and similar episodes are usually fairly filed under “Morons” and can be recovered from if not forgotten. College students, however, engaging in this kind of race-obsessed word confusion is too much for my always combustible brain. This caused my head to do its best Krakatoa impression.

Ready? You are warned: Continue reading →

Harvard Picks The Wrong “Niggardly Principle”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments
Ah, Lowell House! I lived right under that damn bell tower. Never dreamed that the House Master was a slaveholder....

Ah, Lowell House! I lived right under that damn bell tower. Never dreamed that the House Master was a slaveholder….

I had been waiting with trepidation to see how Harvard would embarrass itself in the current college campus political correctness/ black student extortion/ free speech rejection meltdown. The result is an anti-climax, but, yes, still embarrassing.

Apparently some students have been making a classic “niggardly” complaint, like the infamous D.C. government employees who believed that good old Anglo-Saxon word for cheap was the racial slur it resembles. In the case of Harvard students, the beef was that the term “House Master,” used to describe the Harvard faculty member who oversees, manages and hosts one of the many residential “houses” that serve as mini-campuses for Harvard sophomores, juniors and seniors, was racially insensitive and offensive to black students. Never mind that the word “master” has dozens of applications, almost all of which have nothing to do with slavery. The theory appears to be that if a word has ever been used in a context offensive to blacks, all uses of the word in the future, whatever the context, must be assumed to have racially oppressive intent.

Huh. It’s funny: I attended Harvard with black students, and it was during a period when civil rights protests and upheaval were everywhere, including on campus. Yet somehow, this blatantly racist use of “master” never came up. Why? Well… Continue reading →

Hoping That Future Presidential Candidates Won’t Be Asked About Whether They Would Kill Baby Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

back-to-the-future-delorean

I refused to weigh in on the brief and silly ethics question being asked of various Presidential candidates regarding whether they would kill Baby Hitler given the chance via DeLorean or Star Trek gateway or something similar. I am beginning to wonder, though, if candidates to lead whatever is left of the U.S. 50 years from now will be asked a similar question about killing Baby Trump.

I have written…

Donald Trump’s revolting candidacy…cannot fairly be called the most unethical presidential candidacy, but it is early yet. It may well prove to be one of the most harmful. As the United States faces some of the most difficult challenges in its history, Trump has chosen to use the nation’s process of deciding on its leader for his own ego gratification and self-promotion, without  preparation for the job, deference to fair campaign rhetoric, or acknowledgment of his own fatal flaws as a candidate. Exploiting his status as a media celebrity in a celebrity-besotted culture, as well as the news media’s lack of discipline or principle, he is opportunistically advancing his candidacy on the lack of credible GOP contenders, using tabloid headline tactics….Donald Trump is perfectly happy to make a mockery of the presidential nomination and election processes while distorting them too. If he manages to convince enough fools to vote for him, hell, sure…he’d have a blast running for President. If his run peters out, it’s still worth lots of publicity, and increases the value of the Trump “brand.” Even the most unethical of the previous candidacies were based on a sincere, if misguided belief that the country’s welfare would be served by it. Does Trump have that belief? I wonder. No, his can’t be called the most unethical candidacy. But it is reckless, and it is intentionally appealing to the worst in 21st Century American character: fear, celebrity worship, ignorance, and materialism. Meanwhile, every second of attention his candidacy distracts from serious consideration of our nation’s leadership reduces the chances of the public doing its hardest and most important job carefully and competently.

I wrote that five years ago. Continue reading →

And The Michele Bachmann Memorial Award For The Most Disqualifying Ignorance Of American History Demonstrated By A Republican Presidential Candidate Goes To….

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Michele-Bachmann1

Ben Carson, of course!

WARNING: the next person who tells me that Ben Carson must be intelligent because he separated conjoined twins is going to get a punch in the mouth, unethical or not.

The award is named for Bachmann because she repeatedly mangled American history on the way to becoming the 2012 Republican Presidential hopeful who most embarrassed her party, her gender, her species, bipeds,  and the American educational system. On the way to losing all respect, credibility and the nomination, Bachmann told her cheering, stupid crowds that the “shot heard round the world” was in New Hampshire, and that John Quincy Adams, a little boy in 1776, was a Founding Father. (Bachmann also confused John Wayne with John Wayne Gacy, the serial child killer, and I’m not forgiving that, either.)

Believe it or not, Carson’s award winning statement is worse. Yesterday,on C-SPAN, he said this in his usual inspiring eyes half closed, lips barely moving, droning delivery, when he was asked which of the Founders most impressed him:

“I’m impressed by a lot of them, but particularly impressed with Thomas Jefferson, who seemed to have very deep insight into the way that people would react. And he tried to craft our Constitution in a way that it would control people’s natural tendencies and control the natural growth of the government.”

No, that’s not a slip of the tongue. He specifically mentions Jefferson, and he was not talking about the Declaration but the Constitution, with which Tom had nothing to do—he didn’t write it,he didn’t sign it, and he wasn’t at the Convention.

Dr. Carson’s ignorant, he’s faking it, and he’s an idiot…just like Bachmann, who graduated from law school, remember.

Carson hasn’t bothered to acquire the basic knowledge of his country necessary to become an American citizen, much less to presume to lead  it.

When I interviewed for a job, I made sure that I knew the basics about the company or organization I was attempting to join, because that demonstrated that I was serious and responsible, and at least had a threshold understanding of what my job might require. Carson would flunk a basic job interview, even without being scored down for his terrible presentation—you can’t look an interviewer in the eyes with your eyes closed.

Would it be unfair to require as a prerequisite of running for the leadership of a nation to be able to answer 5th grade-level questions about that nation’s history? You know…who was the first President? Which side won the Civil War? Who delivered the Gettysburg Address?

Which founding document did Thomas Jefferson write????

I don’t think that would be unfair at all.

Here Doctor, you arrogant disgrace, watch this (it’s videoed from a TV screen—tough), since you obviously never read a history book:

 

 

 

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Quote Of The Week: My Progressive, Rational, Educated and Gay Facebook Friend”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

stereotypes

Unlike most Comments of the Day, this one by Penn/Same Penn, who has two aliases here due to WordPress’s inexplicable habit of eating his posts, requires some back-reading to fully appreciate…but it is worth the effort.

The original post is about a Facebook friend’s mass condemnation of the Lone star State as a frightening, bigoted and  violent place where he would never set foot, in part because of his anger over Houston’s rejection last week of a bill that would expand LGBT civil rights in the city. My post noted that painting Texas with such a broad and harsh brush is itself bigotry—a position that cannot be rebutted, I believe—and reader Neil protested that the anti-Texas and Texans sentiment was just.

This inspired P/SP to one of the most eloquent and thoughtful posts Ethics Alarms has ever received, on any topic, and his is complex here, far ranging from its inspiration.

Here is Penn’s Comment of the Day on the post, Unethical Quote Of The Week: My Progressive, Rational, Educated and Gay Facebook Friend: Continue reading →